An anonymous reader writes: The tech sector is hot—but quirky. Karen Wickre, editorial director at Twitter, is an industry veteran despite lacking a typical tech background. Her suggestions for how less obvious applicants--young humanities grads, people over 40 and disgruntled journalists--should approach the tech industry ends up being great advice about work in general, and how to think about your own career passions.

swell writes: "I'm preparing a concise video that considers the question "What is the meaning of life?" I've read some historical perspectives (see Wikipedia) and some modern ideas, but you, an enlightened member of the Slashdot elite, are bound to have a more interesting angle. If you can link to sound, pics, video or essays that illustrate your thoughts, so much the better. If you have the ultimate answer we will all be grateful and worship at your feet."

Sez Zero writes: A moderate alcoholic high loosens a person’s focus of attention, making it easier to find connections among remotely related ideas, Andrew Jarosz of the University of Illinois at Chicago and his colleagues propose online January 28 in Consciousness and Cognition.

On average, participants at peak intoxication solved about nine problems correctly, versus approximately six winners for the sober crowd. It took an average of 11.5 seconds for intoxicated men to generate a correct solution, compared with 15.2 seconds for sober men.

Layzej writes: On March 15 Professor Bill Cronon posted his first blog. The subject was the role of the American Legislative Exchange Council in influencing recent legislation in this state and across the country. Less than two days later his university received a communication formally requesting under the states Open Records Law copies of all emails he sent or received pertaining to matters raised in the blog.

Remarkably, the request was sent to the universities legal office by Stephan Thompson of the Republican Party of Wisconsin, with no effort to obscure the political motivations behind it. In a recent editorial the New York Times notes that demanding copies of e-mails and other documents is the latest technique used by conservatives to silence critics.

Posted
by
samzenpus
on Sunday October 03, 2010 @11:11AM
from the start-of-something-great dept.

Hugh Pickens writes "Alexis Madrigal has an interesting essay in the Atlantic about the popular response of people in the 19th century to the development of the electric power industry in America. Before electricity, basically every factory had to run a bit like a Rube Goldberg machine, transmitting power from a water wheel or a steam engine to the machines of a manufactory but with the development of electric turbines and motors the public believed engineers were tapping mysterious, invisible forces with almost supernatural powers for mischief. 'Think about it,' writes Madrigal. 'You've got a wire and you've got a magnet. Switch on the current — which you can't see and have no intuitive way to know exists — and suddenly the wire begins to rotate around the magnet. You can reverse the process, too. Rotate the magnet around the wire and it generates a current that can be turned into light, heat, or power.' And that brings us back to Rube Goldberg, a cartoonist who was was shockingly popular in his heyday and whose popularity closely parallels the rise of electrification in America. 'I think Goldberg's drawings reminded his contemporaries of a time when they could understand the world's industrial processes just by looking. No matter how absurd his work was, anyone could trace the reactions involved,' writes Madrigal. 'People like to complain that they can't understand modern cars because of all the fancy parts and electronic doo-dads in them now, but we lost that ability for most things long ago.'"